The present invention relates to a storage system and a power control method therefor, an adapter and a power control method therefor, and a storage controller and a control method therefor. The present invention is preferably used for a storage system composed of, for example, a Network Attached Storage (NAS) head and a disk array device.
Lately, the amount of data dealt with in a computer system has increased dramatically. For the effective use and management of the enormous amount of data, a technique has been developed by which a plurality of disk array devices and host computers are connected to one another via a dedicated network called a SAN (Storage Area Network), thereby enabling a massive number of high-speed accesses to the disk array devices. In order to connect the disk array devices and the host computer(s) using the SAN and enabling high-speed data transfer, it is common to configure a network using communication devices that are subject to a fiber channel protocol.
On the other hand, a network system called NAS has been developed in which a plurality of disk array devices and host computer(s) are connected to one another via a network using a Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) protocol, thereby enabling file-level access to the disk array devices.
In the NAS network system, devices called NAS heads having a TCP/IP communication function and a file system function are arranged between the network and the respective disk array devices, thereby enabling data access from the host computer(s) file by file (For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-351703). Recently, special attention has been focused on a grand-scale NAS network system where a file system is integrated with disk array devices that are managed by a Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (this is a set word) (RAID) system for providing storage resources of a huge size, called midrange class or enterprise class.